Dr. Usta received his BSc from Bogazici University (Istanbul, Turkey) and his PhD in Chemical Engineering from University of Florida (Gainesville, Florida). He joined the Institute in 2009 as a postdoctoral fellow, and was promoted to Instructor in Surgery at Harvard Medical School in 2013.  His work at the Institute lies at the intersection between micro-tissue engineering, biopreservation, and computational modeling. He currently leads a team that aims to recapitulate liver physiology on a microfluidic chip as part of the NIH/DARPA initiatives of “Tissues/Human-on-a-Chip”. Dr. Usta is also part of the “Supercooling Preservation” team where he leads the efforts on preservation at the cellular and tissue level as well the use of microfabricated platforms and computational models to better elucidate such preservation. These projects are funded by the NIH and Shriners Hospitals among others. He has more than 20 publications spanning Physical Review Letters, Lab on a Chip, ACS Nano, Technology, and Nature Medicine.  These have been cited over 350 times and have been featured in major news outlets as well as science blogs.  In addition to his Institute roles and in particular, the Center for Engineering in Medicine, Dr. Usta also serves as the Junior Executive Editor of “Technology Journal”.

Representative publications

Berendsen TA, Bruinsma BG, Puts CF, Saeidi N, Usta OB, Uygun BE, et al. Supercooling enables long-term transplantation survival following 4 days of liver preservation. Nat Med. 2014 Jul; 20(7):790-3. PubMed PMID: 24973919; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC4141719

Hegde M, Jindal R, Bhushan A, Bale SS, McCarty WJ, Golberg I, et al. Dynamic interplay of flow and collagen stabilizes primary hepatocytes culture in a microfluidic platform. Lab Chip. 2014 Jun 21; 14(12):2033-9. PubMed PMID: 24770663; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC4036071

Bale SS, Vernetti L, Senutovitch N, Jindal R, Hegde M, Gough A, et al. In vitro platforms for evaluating liver toxicity. Exp Biol Med (Maywood). 2014 Sep;239(9):1180-91. PubMed PMID: 24764241; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC4156546

McCarty WJ, Usta OB, Luitje M, Bale SS, Bhushan A, Hegde M, et al. A novel ultrathin collagen nanolayer assembly for 3-D microtissue engineering: Layer-by-layer collagen deposition for long-term stable microfluidic hepatocyte culture. Technology (Singap). 2014 Mar; 2(1):67-74. PubMed PMID: 24932459; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC4054686

Information

Center for Engineering in Medicine
Massachusetts General Hospital, Rm 404
51 Blossom Street
Boston, MA, 02114

View Berk’s Harvard Catalyst profile

Visit Google Scholar and BerkUsta.com